Cue raises £3.7m led by Knife Capital and FAM Investments
This article covers Cue, an AI customer service startup, which has raised £3.7m in a seed funding round to speed development of its autonomous AI platform and expand internationally. The funding will accelerate product work on voice, security and enterprise integrations and scale sales beyond the UK and South Africa, supporting businesses seeking to automate customer support.
Cue has raised £3.7m in a seed funding round to speed up development of its AI-powered customer service platform and expand internationally, as businesses look to deploy autonomous AI agents that can resolve support requests end to end. The funding will be used to accelerate product work on voice, security and enterprise integrations and to scale sales beyond the UK and South Africa.
Why it matters
Customer service is a persistent pain point for many businesses because interactions are spread across channels and legacy tooling forces customers to repeat information. Cue says its platform already handles more than 500 million messages and conversations a year for over 500 customers across automotive, retail, insurance, finance and education, and reported ARR growth of more than 160% year on year in its latest financial year.
The wider industry is now testing agentic AI that can not only respond but reason and act across systems. If platforms can safely automate multi-step workflows, businesses stand to reduce support costs and speed up resolution — but the technical and security challenges of doing this at scale are significant. Cue’s funding targets those exact areas.
Inside the product
Cue builds a unified customer service platform that combines autonomous AI agents with a human-facing inbox and ticketing desk so agents retain context when they need to intervene. The company supports channels including WhatsApp, webchat, email, Messenger, USSD, SMS and voice.
Cue says first-generation agents already resolve over 60% of conversations autonomously. The next generation of agents is being designed to execute secure, cross-system tasks — for example qualifying leads and adding them to CRMs, checking order status, booking appointments, processing returns, handling student applications and sending payment links. The company frames its approach as automation-first but not automation-only: AI handles repetitive, high-volume work while humans focus on complex or sensitive interactions.
The seed funding will advance three priorities: engineering (next-wave agents, deeper voice infrastructure, stronger security), go-to-market expansion in the UK and South Africa and new verticals, and product work on more channels, richer agent actions, deeper integrations and advanced analytics.
Who are the investors?
The round was co-led by Knife Capital and FAM Investments. Cue has not detailed additional participants.
In the announcement, Keet van Zyl, Founding Partner at Knife Capital, said:
Customer service remains the lifeblood of every enduring business. As AI reshapes enterprise software, the winners will be companies that enhance human capability rather than replace it. Cue has built a platform that delivers measurable value today, led by a team with the vision, technical depth and execution ability to be a category leader. That's exactly the type of business Knife Capital looks to back.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Richard Nischk, CEO of Cue, said:
It's an exciting time of transformation for the company. We're at an inflection point for AI in customer service, and we see more businesses starting to realise that they need a unified platform to succeed, not a patchwork of point solutions.
In the announcement, Richard Nischk, CEO of Cue, said:
Rising costs have put support teams under pressure to do more with less. At the same time, consumers want self-service but are increasingly frustrated by poor automated experiences. Our goal is to help businesses deliver a genuinely great automated experience, while also recognising that escalating to a human is often the right thing to do.
The bigger picture
This seed round underscores continued investor interest in AI-driven automation for customer service and the effort to bring agentic capabilities into enterprise-grade products. Cue’s focus on security, voice and integrations targets common blockers for adoption: cross-system actioning and safe execution of transactions.
The deal also highlights cross-border momentum between the UK and South Africa in enterprise software, and reflects growing interest from AI investors in tools that combine automation with human oversight. How companies like Cue handle governance, data protection and integration complexity will shape whether autonomous agents become a mainstream part of customer service stacks across Europe and beyond.
This funding rounds up a wave of early-stage capital flowing into UK AI startups building horizontal tools for enterprise software, and will be one to watch as the company moves from pilotable automation to production-grade agentic services.
They've invested in Cue
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Knife Capital( ) Cape Town, South Africa | ||||
 FAM Investments( ) | ||||
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